1. Field of the Invention
The following relates in general to telecommunication networks, and more particularly, to generating ringtones based on calling-party identity and calling-party and/or called-party preferences.
2. Description of Related Art
Since inception, telephones have been equipped with a bell or other audible device, e.g., a “ringer” to alert their users of an incoming call. Today, telephones are equipped with audible devices that play ringtones to alert their users of an incoming call and/or message. These audible devices, which are especially predominant among mobile (e.g., cellular) telephone technologies, commonly support a variety of resident, preprogrammed ringtones that a user of a receiving telephone can select, amend, and/or alter. Modern telecommunication and/or computer networks allow users to download an ever-increasing library of ringtones, thereby providing a wide degree of flexibility, control and personalization, thus changing an otherwise neutral device into something personal, and, in many cases, endearing.
More recently, and again, more predominantly in mobile telephone technologies, a user of a receiving telephone is now able to manually associate the resident, programmed ringtones to a particular calling party's phone number. This way, when a call that has an associated ringtone is terminated to the receiving telephone, the receiving telephone may play the associated ringtone.
To facilitate this, the receiving telephone receives information, such as the calling-party's phone number and name, from a telecommunications network that is relaying the call. This information may be relayed to the receiving telephone using, for example, the well-known caller-line identification (“Caller ID”) service, which allows the information to be displayed as textual information (i.e., Caller ID text) to the user of the receiving telephone. In addition to displaying the information, the receiving telephone may match the Caller-ID information to an associated ringtone, and then play the associated ringtone to allow the user of the receiving telephone to identify (and/or determine whether to answer the call from) the calling party without needing to look at the Caller ID text.
This arrangement has several shortcomings. First, the calling party cannot influence the ringtone. That is, the ringtone is determined by the receiving party. This happens because the receiving party (i) chooses a telephone model from a wide variety of telephone models, which generally limits the available ringtones (preprogrammed or otherwise); (ii) selects a ringtone from the available ringtones based on, for the most part, personal choices, and then (iii) associates the selected ringtone to a given calling party phone number.
Second, the receiving party must manually associate a ringtone for each potential calling party to identify each calling party. Thus, the receiving telephone will use a default or generic ringtone for calling party numbers that do not have an associated ringtone. Third, if the user wishes to uniquely identify each calling party, then the user has to associate a different ringtone to each calling party number. Fourth, although a wide variety of ringtones exist, each telephone model and generally limits the available ringtones (preprogrammed or otherwise).
Fourth, the association of ringtones with calling parties typically does not extend beyond an individual telephone device. Consequently, each receiving telephone may have different ringtone-to-calling party number association for the same calling party number. The net result is that each user of a receiving device will have a different experience for calls from the same calling party. Moreover, the user of the receiving telephone has to undesirably put up with a certain amount of tedium to maintain the ability to identify different calling parties.